A horrific massacre! The repression unleashed on protesters in Iran knows no bounds; the mullahs' regime, the faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie in power, is fighting for its survival. It knows this and is responding like all bourgeois factions in such dire straits: it is shooting into the crowd! It is massacring as it did before, in sinister memory, during the 2019 protests against the sudden rise in petrol prices or during the protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. But today, this particularly reactionary faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie is cornered by widespread protest and anger across the country, and is responding with unprecedented cruelty in an attempt to maintain its domination. At the time of writing, more than 16,000 dead are piled up in the country's morgues,1 [1] not counting the wounded, particularly those with eye injuries, as the forces of repression favour shooting at the head. More than 26,000 people have been arrested2 [2] and thousands of death sentences have been handed down, making this large-scale repression the biggest massacre since the mass executions of 1988.

However, this repression will only increase hatred of the regime and will do nothing to resolve the economic turmoil shaking the country. The Iranian economy is increasingly suffering from the burden of the war economy, with considerable military expenditure, and has thus seen the collapse of the national currency (which lost 30% of its value in 2025) and runaway inflation (officially 52%). Nothing will stop the impoverishment of a growing section of the population and the misery affecting various social strata. But this time, it was not the most disadvantaged and oppressed sections of society that initiated the protests; the explosion of anger came from sections of the bourgeoise and petty bourgeoisie that had previously supported the regime. It was these sections that immediately imposed their nationalist demands on the movement.

Starting in the Tehran bazaar, a political pillar of the current regime, the demonstrations quickly advanced slogans in favour of increased support for the national economy (“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, may my life be sacrificed for Iran”), which expressed the grievances of shopkeepers and property owners. Despite the regime's attempts to stem social discontent by giving a little ground on ‘individual freedoms’, the movement initiated by various factions of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie gained momentum and was joined by masses of demonstrators from all walks of life. The anger that was expressed massively at the end of December by the majority of the population could no longer be appeased by a few superficial concessions and turned into confrontations with the forces of repression throughout the country.

A deadly impasse exploited by the bourgeoisie

The extent of the anger and despair (“we're already dead” was the rallying cry of the demonstrators) is a tragic manifestation of the decomposition of capitalism, which breeds indignation and revolt against corruption, poverty and repression. However, due to their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois origins and their nationalist orientation in favour of saving the Iranian economy, these demonstrations developed on a terrain that necessarily led to their instrumentalisation by different factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie for the benefit of the opposition, itself riddled with rivalries and deep-seated hatreds between different factions. All of them are incapable of presenting an alternative for the management of the country, with some factions calling for the ‘democratisation’ of Iran and others for the return of the son of the former Shah... Behind these rival cliques lurked imperialist vultures, each with their own agenda, such as Trump, who promised aid to the demonstrators and on whom some even called on to intervene militarily as a matter of urgency to support the movement.

Whatever the outcome of these internal confrontations and external interference, Iran is at serious risk of disintegration because it is composed of a mosaic of minorities, including Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis, which are influenced by local factions and foreign powers. The centrifugal tendencies leading to the disintegration of the country can only increase and threaten to plunge not only the country but also the entire Middle East region into immense instability and barbarism. The protests in Iran are not taking place on a proletarian terrain. By getting involved, workers have everything to lose. And the risk is that an entire generation of workers will be wiped out for the sole benefit of bourgeois cliques that have no future and are just as barbaric and exploitative as the mullahs. As capitalism sinks inexorably into chaos, no faction of the bourgeoisie has any perspective to offer other than barbarism and misery.

The boundless hypocrisy of the world bourgeoisie

The hypocrisy of the world bourgeoisie knows no bounds when it comes to promoting its own national interests. Thus, Russia and China, allies of the bloody regime in Tehran, cynically express concern ‘over the spectre of chaos in the country’ and call for ‘peace and stability’ (sic). The various European states, for their part, have limited themselves to summoning the Iranian ambassadors to express their ‘disapproval’ of the situation. As for Trump, he led the demonstrators in Iran to believe that he was on their side, promised to come to their rescue and threatened the Mullahs' regime with terrifying reprisals... only to ultimately do an about-face and leave the field open to bloody repression, while cynically claiming to have received assurances from the Iranian authorities that the repression would cease. In reality, Trump couldn't care less about the Iranian population: his main concern is to settle scores with a regime that has been an enemy of the United States since 1979, to prevent it from developing its nuclear power and continuing to play the spoiler in the Middle East, and finally to demonstrate the unrivalled military power of the United States. At the same time the Trump regime is bowing to pressure from the Arab oil monarchies, which fear above all else an implosion of Iran that would lead to chaos throughout the Gulf region. Finally, Israel can’t hide its hypocrisy either. Is there any regime that has shown its cruelty more openly in the last two years? After massive bombings in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, after the massacre of innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the relentless attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, Netanyahu has the audacity to present himself as the defender of the Iranian people against the ‘yoke of tyranny’, calling on the population to take to the streets to be massacred. In reality, he is cynically calculating that these clashes will further weaken his main imperialist rival in the region.

As for the mullahs' regime, which unblinkingly invokes its ‘revolutionary’ and moral superiority and claims, with the support of a section of the ‘anti-imperialist’ far left, to be fighting against the imperialist domination of the United States and Israel, it clearly has nothing to envy the latter in terms of cynicism and barbarism, whether through the gigantic corruption that plagues the regime or the brutal repression it exercises over its own population, both during demonstrations and by massively executing members of the political opposition.

All the bourgeoisies of the world are cut from the same cloth as the mass murderers in Tehran. All of them have, in one way or another, shed the blood of populations and proletarians in their wars and other imperialist crusades, or simply in their numerous savage operations of repression. Far from being an isolated case, Iran is the caricatured expression of a fundamental trend in the period of capitalist decomposition that we are experiencing: the uncontrollable collapse of the world economy, the absolute impoverishment of increasingly large sections of humanity, including in the central countries, the all-out development of imperialist tensions leading to a general arms race, and the tendency of all regimes, whether democratic or not, towards an increasingly openly repressive, totalitarian mode of government. Faced with this situation, the working class must avoid being drawn into the bourgeois trap of revolts to ‘change the regime’ and must not allow itself to be drawn into the settling of scores between the different factions of the ruling class. On the contrary, it must wage the struggle on its own terms, based on the defence of its own class interests, as the Iranian proletariat has been able to do on a number of occasions since the late 1970s. This will be the only way for it to ultimately politicise its struggle, enabling it to assert its revolutionary perspective.

HG, 15 January 2026

1 [3]) According to Iran International and CBS News on 20 January 2026.

2 [4]) Figures provided by the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

For the past year, the deepening global crisis of capitalism, the growing destabilisation of the world economy, Trump's disruptive “America first” economic policy, and the explosion of military spending in Europe following the split within NATO, have forced the European bourgeoisie as a whole to intensify their attacks on social budgets and workers' wages. This is particularly true for Belgium, which is also burdened by heavy sovereign debt and a large state budget deficit, denounced by the EU.

Over the past year, taking advantage of unexpectedly favourable election results, the Belgian bourgeoisie has set up a new centre-right government under the leadership of Bart De Wever, which plans to cut nearly €26 billion from the budget in order to reduce the state debt (105% of GNP) and announcing a new package of measures worth nearly €10 billion to limit the budget deficit, while at the same time doubling the national defence budget.

For the past year, workers have been facing severe attacks on state social spending, particularly on unemployment benefits (now limited to a maximum of two years, which will result in the exclusion of 100,000 unemployed people from 2026 onwards), pensions (penalties for early retirement and cuts to civil service and teachers' pension schemes), and health benefits (half a million long-term sick people risk losing their benefits due to ‘insufficient or uncooperative’ efforts to return to work). In addition, in terms of wages, bonuses for overtime or night work are being drastically reduced and the government plans to ‘temporarily and partially suspend’ the automatic indexation of wages and benefits to inflation in 2026.

The growth of workers’ resistance

As soon as the government's plans were announced at the end of 2024, the unions rushed to occupy the social arena by announcing various actions to limit any workers reaction. However, workers' response has been strong, exceeding the unions' expectations, and forcing them to step up their actions and, above all, to increase the number of national demonstrations in Brussels.

Let us take a closer look at the dynamics. As soon as the first leaks about these plans emerged, the trade unions decided to organise a first day of action on 13 December 2024, with the aim of focusing discontent on the European Union's directives. This first day brought together some 10,000 demonstrators, mainly trade union representatives, but the manoeuvre did not reduce discontent. On the contrary, it continued to grow, as evidenced by the second day of action on 13 January, which the trade unions wanted to limit to ‘the defence of pensions in education’. In reality, participation reached 30,000 demonstrators from an increasing number of sectors and from all regions of the country. On 27 January, a ‘historic’ regional sectoral demonstration by French-speaking teaching staff brought together 35,000 participants against the severe cuts imposed by the regional government, with the presence once again of many workers from other sectors and regions. The announcement of the ‘Arizona’ government's austerity programme only fuelled the protests, and the third national demonstration on 13 February, aimed - according to the trade unions - at ‘defending public services’, brought together nearly 100,000 demonstrators from all sectors, who expressed their desire to move beyond the sectoral and regional fragmentation of the movement imposed by the unions and called for a global fight against the government's attacks. Despite attempts by the unions to demobilise the movement during the spring through passive one-day general strikes, where everyone stays at home, or repeated and highly unpopular sectoral strikes in the railways, with divisions between unions, the last national demonstration on 25 June, on the eve of the holidays, still brought together nearly 50,000 demonstrators expressing their undiminished fighting spirit.

Beyond the figures, it is important to highlight the characteristics of this dynamic of growing militancy:

- it was triggered not by concrete and specific measures, but by the announced global plans. More than ever, the slogan ‘enough is enough’ was at the heart of the desire to mobilise;

- it was marked by a refusal to be passive, to remain ‘isolated in one's corner’, but on the contrary by a desire to mobilise ‘on the streets’;

- Finally, it was characterised by a refusal to fragment the movement, but pushed for the unification of resistance across sectors and regions.

Even if the combative dynamic of these first six months of 2025 in Belgium was still not able to detect, let alone oppose, the unions' manoeuvres of diversion and sabotage, the development of resistance was firmly rooted in the class struggle, and its characteristics, as outlined above, are similar to those of the summer of discontent in the UK in 2022, the movement against pension reform in France during the winter of 2023, and the strikes in the United States, particularly in the automotive industry and at Boeing, in late 2023 and early 2024. Thus, the mobilisation of the working class in Belgium is part of the international dynamic of ‘rupture’.

It is essential to understand that this dynamic of labour struggle in Belgium is not isolated but is one of the expressions of a break with years of passive submission by workers to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, of atomisation, but also of underground maturation and the ongoing process of reflection. "The recovery of worker’s’ combativity in a number of countries is a major, historic event which does not only result from local circumstances and can’t be explained by purely national conditions. […] Carried forward by a new generation of workers, the breadth and simultaneity of these movements testify to a real change of spirit in the class and represents a break with the passivity and disorientation which has prevailed from the end of the 1980s up till now."[1]

The bourgeoisie is trying to make people forget the gains made by workers' mobilisations in early 2025

However, the summer holiday ‘break’ was largely used by the unions to take the lead and develop an insidious tactic with the intention of countering this rising dynamic of militancy and unity across sectors, under the guise of radicalism. Thus, they first called for a new national demonstration on 14 October with the intention of ‘breaking all records’, while taking care to hinder the momentum of militancy and reflection. They distributed more than 75,000 free train tickets to their members to come and spend the day in Brussels and avoided any gathering or discussion at the end of the demonstration, thanks in part to the confrontations between the Black Blocs and the police, which led to the rapid dispersal of the demonstration.

In short, the unions succeeded in creating a misleading image of great radicalism through the 130,000 participants, while largely dissolving any expression of combativity or reflection within the demonstration. Having succeeded in presenting themselves as the leaders of the struggle, the unions then announced two types of movements, presented as further steps in the escalation of the struggle: a series of three days of strikes leading up to a general strike on the last day from 24 to 26 November, and the implementation of radical actions in certain sectors, such as the possibility of a week-long strike by railway workers in December.

When the unions announce ‘attacking actions’, mistrust is in order. And indeed, on closer inspection, it is clear that the announced actions are precisely aimed at undermining the gains of the struggles from December 2024 to June 2025:

- totally passive general strikes, where strikers remain individually at home, aim to make people forget the dynamic of active mobilisation and gathering in the demonstrations of the winter and spring of 2025. In fact, the so-called three-day general strike from 24 to 26 November is a joke designed to blind the working class, with no real gatherings and no possibility of travelling and meeting up. Moreover, the calls for strike action differ according to sector and region, and companies such as La Poste, secondary education and many private firms are not participating.

- the organisation of sectoral movements (railway workers, bus drivers), regional movements (French-speaking education) or movements by social category (unemployed, long-term sick, retired), stimulated by the fact that the first concrete and specific measures are being taken, aims to counter the momentum for unification across sectors and regions that emerged from the demonstrations in the first half of 2025 and to exhaust these sectors in long and unpopular movements.

Furthermore, the trade union initiative is supported by a whole series of campaigns, propagated in particular by the leftists of the PTB, aimed at recuperating the more “critical” elements around the mobilisations for Gaza and a Palestinian state or against violence against women.

Finally, the bourgeois media constantly harp on about the “irresponsible” nature of workers' resistance in the face of threats to national security (hype about unidentified drones over military bases) and the danger of bankruptcy for the “worst pupil in the European class” if budget cuts are not made. Even the unions subscribe to this argument and recognise that everyone must make efforts and tighten their belts, provided that this is ‘fair’, in line with the campaign developed by the left and far left of the bourgeois apparatus, which claims that ‘the wealthy must also accept sacrifices’.

Against the barbarism of capitalism, class confrontations will continue

Clearly, the unions have taken the lead, and the momentum of the struggle has reached a plateau for the moment as it faces a multitude of obstacles: not only those which, as we see in the case of the unions, are put in place by the capitalist state to prevent the development of a real fighting force of the exploited, but also those which are the product of the descent into misery, war and barbarism that global capitalism is bringing about in its final phase of decomposition. Faced with these obstacles, workers are only very slowly regaining their consciousness of being a social and historical force, the working class. In the current context of capitalist decomposition, characterised by fragmentation, withdrawal into oneself, and fear of the future, reconnecting with one's international class identity and the revolutionary perspective it contains is a difficult and tortuous challenge.

However, while the resistance of the working class is temporarily numbed in Belgium, this does not mean that it has been defeated, for several reasons:

- anger has not disappeared; the working class in Belgium has not been defeated; it retains its potential for struggle and reflection continues within it;

- the struggles in Belgium are part of an international dynamic of struggles and contribute to the maturing of consciousness that is developing at an international level within the class and which will grow;

- the economic situation continues to worsen and attacks will materialise and intensify on all fronts, as already announced in the government's new plan for budget cuts of nearly €10 billion: unemployment, pensions, social and sickness benefits, indexation, working more for the same wage, flexible working without compensation (night work), price increases, etc.

- in addition, the destabilisation of political structures linked to the decomposition of capitalism is likely to increase pressure on the living and working conditions of the working class, as in the case of the Brussels region, where the inevitability of financial bankruptcy and budgetary paralysis is becoming clearer due to the absence of a government for more than a year and a half.

The class confrontations currently shaking Belgium are particularly illustrative of the context in which workers' struggles will develop in the current period, especially in industrialised countries, with attacks coming from all sides due to the acceleration of the economic crisis, interacting in a whirlwind with the expansion of militarism and the spread of chaos. Whether or not they succeed in forcing the government to back down (necessarily temporarily), these struggles are not in vain. By raising their heads collectively, by refusing to resign themselves, workers are preparing for future struggles and, step by step, despite inevitable defeats, we are laying the foundations for a new world. It is only through struggle that the proletariat can become conscious that it is the only force capable of abolishing capitalist exploitation.

R. Havanais / 24.11.2025

From Venezuela to Kashmir, from Greenland to Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine and the Sahel, the capitalist world is burning on all sides. Guns are roaring in the China Sea, the Middle East is ablaze, Iran is sinking into immense chaos. And the United States, hitherto presented as the ‘champion of democracy’, is the biggest arsonist on the planet: for dubious projects in Greenland, Trump is hammering another nail into the coffin of the transatlantic alliance; in an attempt to drive China out of Latin America, he is destabilising an entire continent; he is relegating the UN bandits to the background in favour of a nebulous project, the ‘Board of Peace’, which has all the hallmarks of an extortion operation... We are witnessing a profound acceleration of militarism, chaos, and confrontation between bourgeois cliques.

Choosing one bourgeois camp over another is always a dead end

While the United States is at the heart of this global chaos, Trump is also the product of a capitalist system gone mad. For in every country, powerful or not, democratic or authoritarian, the bourgeoisie seeks to rally the exploited behind its sordid national interests, whether directly behind a gun or by accepting ‘reforms’ and budget cuts to buy weapons.

In Ukraine, Putin is sending thousands of young people to the slaughter under the delusional pretext of saving Russian-speaking populations from Nazism. On the other side of the front, Zelensky's arch-corrupt government is sending the population to the slaughter in the name of national sovereignty and democracy.

In Gaza, the Israeli army is turning 18- and 20-year-olds into killers, while Hamas cynically uses the population as human shields.

In Iran, while the mullahs are crushing anger in blood, rival factions, actively supported by Israel and the United States, are fuelling revolts in favour of ‘democracy’ and the return of the Shah.

Meanwhile, workers in Europe are being told that ‘sacrifices’ are necessary for rearmament, and minds are being prepared for a war economy: we must ‘accept losing our children,’ in the words of the French Chief of Staff. All this, as always, in the name of democratic values and peace!

And today, we are asked to choose between bloodthirsty mullahs and a ‘democratic’ Iranian bourgeoisie, made up of a bunch of mafiosi, archaic monarchists and upstarts supported by Trump and the mass murderer Netanyahu!

Capitalism oozes misery and death from every pore! The immense chaos that has taken hold in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War is spreading across the entire planet. But we still have to choose the ‘good side’ or the ‘lesser evil’...

No! No faction of the bourgeoisie, democratic or not, powerful or weak, is capable of creating the conditions for a world of peace and stability. Mired in the vicious cycle of capitalism's historical contradictions and dead-ends, they can only spread chaos and death. Choosing one bourgeois camp over another is always choosing our exploiters and murderers.

The only alternative to capitalist wars is world revolution!

Faced with this immense chaos, with the disastrous future that capitalism promises us, fear is spreading across all continents. How should we react? If no bourgeois camp has the solution, what do we do, here and now? Do we passively allow the massacres to continue while we wait for the revolution?

History has shown that the only class capable of ending the wars of capitalism is the proletariat in struggle, and no one else. This was the case when the workers in Russia overthrew the bourgeois state in 1917 and when the workers in Germany revolted in 1918. This revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe and the risk of it spreading to the West forced governments to stop the First World War. This was the case when the return of the working class, starting in May 1968 in France, after decades of counter-revolution, prevented the Russian and American blocs from clashing in a Third World War. The proletariat will have to conquer real and lasting peace by overthrowing capitalism on a global scale!

The proletariat certainly does not yet have the strength to directly oppose war, and the revolutionary perspective is clearly not for tomorrow. The road to the overthrow of capitalism will be long and fraught with pitfalls. But there is no other way. Today, there are two possible directions: either we allow ourselves to be drawn into false alternatives between bourgeois cliques for a fairer and more peaceful capitalism, an ideology that has always contributed to disarming the class in the face of imperialism, whether in the name of the ‘lesser evil’, the ‘right of the aggrieved to defend themselves’, or the ‘right of peoples to self-determination’... Or we can patiently fight to develop our solidarity, our identity and our class consciousness, to develop a movement that is the only one capable of putting an end to capitalism and its wars.

Since 2022, as we have pointed out in numerous articles, the working class has begun to regain its combativity on an international scale.[1] [6] And it is already through these struggles against the sacrifices demanded by militarism that the proletariat is concretely expressing its solidarity with its class brothers and sisters in countries at war.

But above all, this break with the passivity of previous decades is based on an underground development of class consciousness, which is essential for the politicisation of struggles. At different (and very heterogeneous) levels, workers are questioning the future of society, how to organise struggles, and how to recover our class identity. This reflection is the breeding ground for the revolutionary future. It is up to the small communist minorities to push this reflection as far forward as possible in order to prepare for the struggles of tomorrow. That is why, starting today, coming together to reflect, convince and push for debate wherever possible is not a waste of time; on the contrary, it is the best preparation for the future.

EG, 15 January 2026

The bourgeoisie is not content with seeking to directly enlist the proletariat in its wars; it also relies on its left-wing organisations to push the proletariat to accept sacrifices and rally behind this or that bourgeois faction, deemed more ‘progressive’, ‘anti-imperialist’, etc.

Part of the left is thus calling for support for Maduro against Trump's adventures in Venezuela. For the British Trotskyist group Socialist Workers Party (SWP), "there can be no ambiguity or prevarication within the left and the trade union movement: the overthrow of Maduro by the United States will only delay the struggle for liberation in Venezuela and throughout Latin America. […] Take to the streets, show your solidarity with the Venezuelan people who are resisting imperialism, demand that the British government condemn Trump's gangster invasion." In truth, Venezuela’s ‘21st-century socialism’ is nothing but a sham, an abominable machine for exploiting the working class, a regime that has brutally repressed the struggles of the working class. This “beacon for the left, progressive movements and resistance to imperialism” (according to the SWP) has driven eight million migrants (out of a population of 28 million) to flee poverty and repression.

Similarly, fighting Trump's ambitions in Greenland would be tantamount to preserving ‘European values’. For one of the leaders of La France Insoumise, Manuel Bompard, France should “obviously” defend Greenland militarily in the event of an attack by the United States. Let us remember, however, that it is this democratic Europe that is pursuing the same policies of plunder and destruction in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere! Its ‘values’ did not prevent the Danish state in the past from carrying out despicable eugenics campaigns against a population that it now claims to protect from American appetites!

Despite this, Trotskyism still manages to sell us its nationalist rubbish by defending Greenland's independence: “As anti-imperialists and internationalists, we declare our unconditional solidarity with the struggle for self-determination of the communities of Greenland,” in the words of the Révolution Permanente group in France. This is what internationalism means to the left wing of capital: calling for the creation of a new imperialist actor that would inevitably join forces with the United States, Russia, or even China to defend its national interests!

There is nothing left to hope for from capitalist society! Everywhere, the bourgeoisie exploits and murders! Everywhere, wars are conflicts between competing nations, between rival bourgeoisies, where the exploited die for the sole benefit of the exploiters, of whom the leftists are the most zealous representatives!

EG, 15 January 2026

"We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime. [...] What we lack [...] is the strength of character to accept that we must suffer in order to protect who we are. If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept the loss of its children, because, let's be honest, it will suffer economically because priorities will be given to defence production, then we are at risk." The Chief of Staff of the French Army did not mince his words, and was not disavowed by the political world: the future promised to us by the bourgeoisie of the whole world is the war of each against all! And to wage it, the ruling class needs combatants who are willing to be killed for the nation, and non-combatants who are willing to make draconian sacrifices to produce weapons! The so-called necessity of ‘national defence’ against ‘evil’ foreigners who threaten the country, which of course has no desire to wage war but feels ‘obliged’ (sic) to develop its military arsenal to ‘preserve peace’, is a hypocritical fabrication that has been repeatedly disproved by history.

On this point, the workers’ movement has long since exposed the bourgeoisie's lie. Rosa Luxemburg, in her Junius Pamphlet, already denounced similar nonsense about the First World War:

"Making war simply and solely for the protection of the Fatherland was, by the way, not Bismarck's invention. He only carried out, with characteristic unscrupulousness, an old, well-known and truly international recipe of capitalist statesmanship. When and where has there been a war since so-called public opinion has played a role in governmental calculations, in which each and every belligerent party did not, with a heavy heart, draw the sword from its sheath for the single and sole purpose of defending its Fatherland and its own righteous course from the shameful attacks of the enemy?  This legend is as inextricably a part of the game oi war as powder and lead.” [1] The Gauche Communiste de France, in a report dated July 1945, highlighted another equally important aspect of decadent capitalism: “that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism”[2]. We communists have long been warned: capitalism means war! And because of the exacerbation of the historical crisis of this system and the worsening of imperialist tensions, each bourgeoisie is actively preparing for war. But to do so, it needs a docile proletariat that accepts everything that war entails: blood, toil, tears and sweat! Hence, of course, in order to appear less bellicose than ‘the enemy’, the call to ‘protect who we are

This drastic development of militarism in Europe, imposed by the disappearance of the American umbrella, is not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a general trend on all continents. The reintroduction of military service, which is still not compulsory in France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, shows that the ruling class has understood that it needs to cultivate a more openly militaristic ideology among young people. Russia has understood this for several years, having introduced the army and its propaganda directly into schools. The prospect is for the development of a more explicit and brutal militarist ideology, and this is not only the work of openly warmongering far-right governments. On the contrary, the entire bourgeoisie, from the far right to the left-wing parties, is unanimous on this point.

In France, the return of a form of conscription is welcomed by all parties, from National Rally to La France Insoumise, with left-wing parties proving to be just as bellicose as the others: Mélenchon, the candidate for La France Insoumise (LFI), has been advocating compulsory military service since 2020, and his colleague Panot hypocritically advocates “citizen conscription [in order to] face the major challenges of our century”.  For the Socialist Party, “it is an important element at a time when we know that deterrence must be restored to prevent future confrontations”; the Ecologists are committed to “strengthening the operational reserve to be resilient in the face of attacks, but also in the face of climate and health risks”. In short, all the bourgeois political factions in France agree: to save the nation, we need soldiers who are willing to be killed, we need cannon fodder! In the United Kingdom and Germany, the bourgeoisie has also intensified its campaigns to recruit young people into the army. As UK Defence Secretary John Healey said: “This is a new era for defence, which means new opportunities for young people to discover and learn from our armed forces” [3] (sic).

Far-left parties, like their big brothers on the electoral left, compete in hypocrisy to hide their support for nationalist ideology, but their role is even more to divide the ‘youth’ and hide the fact that war is the product of all nations, of capitalism as a whole.

Thus, the group Klasse gegen Klasse (KgK), a Trotskyist group in Germany, “opposes war, repression and budget cuts” and proclaims “not a man, not a penny for the war machine!”, but does not hesitate to support one imperialist camp against another in numerous conflicts, such as Palestine against Israel or Venezuela against the United States! The Internationale Sozialistische Organisation, another Trotskyist group in Germany, in turn approves of compulsory military service with the aim of “creating a country that cannot be conquered because its people are armed”[4]. What this means is shown by this organisation's encouragement of the ‘armed people’ of Ukraine, leading to a massacre that is decimating an entire generation of workers in that country. In France, the NPA, as usual, puts the division of the proletariat on the agenda: “Universal National Service and Defence and Citizenship Day are instruments in the service of imperialism and capital. They reproduce oppressive and conservative logics that particularly affect young people of colour and those in precarious situations.”[5] Their rhetoric seeks to isolate young people from immigrant backgrounds from other sections of the working class!

These repugnant arguments, which ultimately aim to promote the interests of national capital, are merely a continuation of all the warmongering propaganda spread by all bourgeois factions. All nations are imperialist because they must defend their interests against their international competitors, and all bourgeoisies, whatever their differences, are nationalist because that is the basis of their existence. This is their central characteristic: from the defence of ‘free Palestine’ to ‘America First’, via the ‘defence of democracy’ or that of ‘socialist regimes’, the defence of the nation is the unmistakable sign of belonging to the ruling class. Nationalism is the flag behind which all bourgeois factions rally, from the far right to the far left. The call to ‘defend the homeland’ is just a way of saying that we must defend the national interests of the class that exploits us, to mobilise us for war with all its attendant miseries.

The reaction was immediate in Germany, a country where the militarism of the ruling class has probably left the worst memories: demonstrations by high school and university students took place despite threats from the authorities, bringing together 35,000 participants across Germany, with very clear slogans: ‘Not a man, not a penny for the Bundeswehr’, ‘Too young to vote, but old enough for war’. The explosion of every man for himself is multiplying tensions and conflicts in all directions, accentuating economic destabilisation and increasing the danger of military confrontations between states. The only future that capitalism offers us is war of each against all and widespread misery. But the sacrifices demanded of the working class in terms of living conditions for the military effort can only clash with the current emergence of workers' militancy: the proletariat alone offers a real alternative to the monstrous future that capitalism is preparing for us, and it alone holds the key to escaping it.

HG, 10 January 2026

[1] Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915), also known as The Junius Pamphlet

2 Report on the Inter­national Situation, July 1945 Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France, quoted in The Historic Course [7] adopted at the 3rd Congress of the ICC, International Review n°18

3 Armed forces to launch ‘Gap Year’ scheme for young people to bolster skills and leadership [8]

4 Volk in Waffen, Gegen den Militarismus [9]

5  See the video https://npa-lanticapitaliste.org/videos/contre-le-capitalisme-guerrier [10]

With the spectacular operation on 3 January, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their sleep in a highly secure residence, the world's leading power sent a warning to the entire world: the United States can use its overwhelming military force at any time to impose and defend its national interests everywhere. Blackmail, open pressure and now kidnapping, typical of mafia systems, are now commonplace within the former international community. And it is using these same open gangster methods that the American power has issued threats against other bandits around the world who, by contrast, appear more civilised, blowing hot and cold on Greenland or Canada, on the Europeans, NATO or the UN at the Davos Forum[1].

The completely fallacious official justification of a fight against Maduro’s narco-terrorism was a mere pretext that fooled no one. Similarly, Trump's great flourishes on Venezuelan oil, widely echoed by all the international bourgeoisies and in particular their leftist factions, to reduce the event to a simple war for resources, is no longer really convincing: the high cost of extraction, dilapidated facilities and instability do not really interest the big oil companies, nor the investors who are not exactly rushing to the gate. The meaning of the event and the scope of the American offensive are indeed elsewhere, much more global, much more brutal and destructive!

An earthquake of historic proportions

In reality, the intentions of the Trump administration and the United States were to strike and intimidate their rivals, particularly China and Russia, in an attempt to deter them from aggressively encroaching on Washington's traditional sphere of influence in Latin America. Commercial incursions on the continent and the construction of port infrastructure are increasingly unwelcome to Uncle Sam, as evidenced, for example, by Trump's reaction in Panama regarding the flow of Chinese goods and control of the canal. Behind the rhetoric of ‘consolidation by hemisphere’ lies a strategic priority that remains absolutely intact: to contain China, the United States' main challenger on the world stage, and prevent its expansion. This is the main motive behind the military adventure in Venezuela.

This brutal policy, which merely reinforces the new National Security Strategy (NSS) announced and published barely a month earlier, is far-reaching. It further opens Pandora's box, accelerating global chaos and disorder to an unprecedented degree. And its method of trampling on international law amounts to nothing less than shattering the entire international order and the institutions put in place to guarantee it, which had been established since 1945 by the United States itself. In this sense, the American offensive marks a considerable deepening of the process of disintegration of capitalist society, a new quality in the evolution of imperialist rivalries and ‘every man for himself’.

Trump's policy, mundanely uninhibited and unpredictable in its contours, is already having profound consequences. In just a few days, Washington has gone from escalating its intervention in Venezuela to making new and very direct threats against Denmark over Greenland, then to seizing a Russian ship in international waters, before announcing massive new arms programmes! Now it is Canada that is directly targeted by the American desire to destabilise the province of Alberta. This policy, which heralds a new escalation of militarism and tensions, is already being implemented in a context of growing instability and totally destructive wars, particularly in Europe between Ukraine and Russia, further accelerating the frantic arms race.[2] While the European Union's reactions to Trump's threats and his desire to make Greenland the 51st state of the United States were initially more firm than usual, the discord within NATO is only growing. Unlike Venezuela, Greenland is part of Denmark, whose integrity is being threatened for the first time by the United States, even though it has been a member of the European Union since 1973 and a founding member of NATO. Similarly, Canada, also threatened by the Trump clan, is a member of the British Commonwealth, NATO and a traditional ally of the United States.

Such an acceleration of the situation and the nature of the threats only serve to inflame tensions, heighten nervousness and reinforce the already existing inability of the major powers to maintain long-term strategic coherence. Events are unfolding at breakneck speed, forcing immediate responses, an upheaval that states cannot take the time to assimilate, leading to tensions where already fragile alliances of the past are quickly called into question, also prompting ephemeral, circumstantial, changing reactions, now without any real compass. Trump's unpredictable threats, following the transatlantic divorce, such as his desire to withdraw support for Ukraine and unilaterally end the conflict, not to mention his threats of exorbitant tariffs on European countries, led to timid condemnation from the latter. Today, even if they are not entirely united, most European countries and the European Union have judged the threats to be ‘unacceptable’ and have taken a united stand. That is why this time they have stood their ground and sent symbolic military contingents to Greenland as a matter of urgency, pushing NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, to perform a complex balancing act, with great exertions, in an attempt to ease the pressure, and apparently sway Trump's intentions and momentarily reassure the ever-worried European bourgeoisie. Such a situation fully confirms the ICC's analysis of the divorce between Uncle Sam and the European Union, highlighting the acceleration of war chaos in a free-for-all, while other groups in the proletarian political milieu continue to talk about a “bloc strengthening itself in preparation for the Third World War”.

More and more voices are now being raised in Europe to assert that the United States is no longer a reliable ally! This conviction has been further reinforced for some members of the European Union, particularly in the face of Trump's latest surprise move to bypass and completely withdraw from the UN framework by inaugurating, at the very moment of the Davos Forum, his own alternative structure, a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ entirely under his control. Ultimately, the European powers find themselves trapped in a situation of strong military and energy dependence on Washington, and their initial firmness appears fragile. This situation can only exacerbate the growing tensions between European states, and within them between pro- and anti-American factions, thus leading to increased political fragility and instability.

But none of this indicates a resurgence of American power and control over the world. On the contrary, the abandonment of multilateralism, the rules of the international order and the democratic mystifications put in place by the United States itself after the Second World War is the clearest expression of its historic decline. While the National Security Strategy (NSS) in no way marks a break with the hegemonic ambitions of American imperialism, it aims to defend its own interests in a context where it is no longer able to impose a “new world order” in the face of the “every man for himself” that dominates the world. So, while some people are concerned about Trump's mental health and wonder why we have reached such a level of chaos and danger in the world, where the United States seems to be shooting itself in the foot in the long term, the answer cannot be found in Trump's personality or profile, however irrational his behaviour may seem. The reasons for his political behaviour and all this chaos are to be found in the historical evolution of the capitalist system. Trump is nothing more than the true face of a capitalism in full putrefaction.

A new acceleration in the phase of capitalist decomposition

After the implosion of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the ‘Soviet’ Union in 1989, which were both products and indicators of the new period of capitalist decomposition, President George W. Bush Sr. announced the advent of a “new world order” under the leadership of the United States and took advantage of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to launch the first Gulf War in order to guarantee, in the name of the ‘international community’ and the UN, respect for international law, to align more than thirty countries behind them and to close ranks with their former European allies.

But soon, the global imperialist landscape was marked by a systematic and widespread questioning of American leadership, including by its European allies. From then on, the American policeman's reactions to defend its leadership became increasingly brutal. During the war in Yugoslavia shortly afterwards, NATO members openly and directly opposed Uncle Sam, who ultimately had the last word by flexing his muscles, leading to the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995 and painstakingly bringing an end to the war in Bosnia. More seriously, during the second war and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, NATO “allies”, including France and Germany, went so far as to refuse to support US policy and participate in military operations. It was without the consent of the UN and with reduced support from NATO members that the Bush Jr. administration invaded Iraq.

Originally, these tensions continued to be part of a multilateral legal and institutional framework that emerged after the Second World War, and the United States' goal at the time was to maintain it as best it could. What's more, all these operations bore the ideological stamp of the ‘fight for freedom and democracy’ against autocratic and dictatorial powers. More than a ‘policeman,’ the United States sought to appear as the herald of the victorious humanist values of the West, the champion of democracy. Wars were systematically waged under the hypocritical guise of ‘humanitarian aid.’[3]

With the open crusade against terrorism following the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and the 2003 Iraq War and its blatant lies about the alleged discovery of weapons of mass destruction, the United States increasingly tended to openly disregard UN decisions, unilaterally waging its own bloody campaigns. Since then, faced with the increasingly obvious failure of a US-sponsored “new world order”, this tendency to increasingly openly disregard international law and intervene militarily, sowing chaos as in Afghanistan, has become more pronounced. The American ‘world policeman’ was in fact increasingly becoming the main gangster causing trouble and chaos.

While Trump is essentially a caricature of this increasingly overt violence, the start of his second term nevertheless represents a real shift in this regard, with the new administration's explicit desire to end the conflict in Ukraine without resorting to multilateralism and traditional diplomatic mechanisms and excluding the main European ‘allies’ from negotiations. The US President's thunderous statements against ‘international law’ and the international institutions supposed to guarantee it are torpedoing the famous democratic values to make way for the pragmatic ‘America First’, confirming a real divorce between the Europeans and Trump's America. The unilateral decision to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities in early summer 2025 confirms that the world order that emerged in 1945 has collapsed, even if the illusion persists of an intervention to “destroy a nuclear threat posed by an anti-democratic power”. With the show of strength in Venezuela, the world's leading bourgeoisie, which had made its democracy a model for the whole world, shows how much interest this class of bandits has in democracy, ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’: these are nothing but lies intended to mask the true face of capitalism, a fundamentally lawless system where the strongest wins, whatever the cost!

Such vandalism on Trump's part can only encourage chaos and the development of tensions and ideological manipulations of all kinds. Russian imperialism will feel emboldened to impose its domination over its ‘sphere of influence’ in Ukraine, the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. China's ambitions towards Taiwan will be reinforced. Europe will be all the more fragile and threatened as it is already experiencing strong dissonance between member states, a process of fragmentation that is well underway. However, the United States cannot emerge victorious from such a dynamic of irrationality and chaos. They are becoming the agents and accelerators of their own decline, undermined from within by a kind of latent civil war, in which Trump and his clan find themselves increasingly isolated in a society fractured on all sides, including among those who supported his presidential campaign behind the MAGA banner. If Trump was forced to soften his stance on Greenland, it was due to external pressure from the Europeans, who reacted more firmly, but also because of the chaotic domestic political situation and the divisions that exist within the world's leading power. [4] This situation reflects the decay of the political apparatus of the ruling class, linked to the phase of decomposition of capitalism.

And the worst is yet to come! Thus, the growing number of rivals will demand accountability and will only throw a spanner in the works of the United States by attempting to use their own weapons, those of destabilisation and chaos. This will be the case, for example, in Latin America, where, far from ‘putting an end to drug trafficking’, Trump's kick in the anthill will only generate a myriad of other types of trafficking. In short, it will be an endless spiral, a vortex that can only lead Uncle Sam to use his only strength, that of weapons, a logic that is becoming widespread and can only lead to the questioning of the very foundations of all civilisation, leading only to nothingness and death.

Faced with this monstrous dynamic, which could ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race, there is only one alternative: the struggle of the proletariat for a communist society.

WH, 24 January 2025

Our public meeting in December 2025[1] aimed to present the Manifesto published by the ICC on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its foundation.[2] It is mainly devoted to a global analysis of the last fifty years of capitalist convulsions and class struggle

The stakes

As both the Manifesto and the introduction to the meeting emphasised the profound responsibilities of the revolutionary minority in the current and future world situation, the first point of discussion focused on evaluating the ICC's analysis of the main developments in the world situation over the last five decades:

• The re-emergence of the proletarian struggle in the wake of the massive strikes in France in May-June 1968, a wave of movements which spanned most regions of the globe and led by a new generation of workers who had not been crushed by the deep counter-revolution which descended on the class following the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave.
• This movement saw many advances in consciousness (which took a very concrete form in the revival of the international communist left and in the formation of the ICC itself) and in the extension and self-organisation of struggles, the high point of which was reached in the mass strike in Poland in 1980.
• These struggles acted as a barrier to the bourgeoisie’s ‘solution’ to the deepening world economic crisis - mobilisation of society for a new world war – but at the same time they did not attain the level of politicisation required to present society with the alternative of proletarian revolution. By the end of the 1980s we had thus reached a kind of social stalemate which gave rise to a new and terminal phase in the decline of the capitalist system: the phase of decomposition
• Even though this new phase brought the old division of the world into military blocs to a close, adding another element to the reasons why a Third World War was not on the historical agenda, the very advance of decomposition could lead to the destruction of humanity through a horrible combination of regional wars, ecological disasters, pandemics and other scourges.
• The 2020s are seeing a clear acceleration of the disintegration of capitalist society and this combination of its various crises in a vortex or whirlwind which is making the perspective of barbarism more tangible than ever. And yet while this is the most visible pole in the world situation, there is a counter-pole: a world proletariat, and above all its most concentrated battalions in western Europe and North America, which has not been through the same level of defeat as in the period 1923-68 and which, from 2022, has inaugurated a new phase in the class struggle, a “rupture” with several decades of retreat in class combativity and consciousness.

The gravity of the world situation emphasises the gravity of the tasks facing those who stand for the communist revolution against capitalism, above all in pushing forward the politicisation of the class movement and in constructing a bridge towards the future communist party, without which any revolutionary upsurge will be doomed to defeat.

What was striking about the first round of interventions at the meeting was the degree to which comrades understood that the alternative of socialism or barbarism is being demonstrated in a very concrete way by the acceleration of wars and ecological collapse across the planet. As a sympathiser wrote to us in response to our request for feedback on the meeting, this growth in understanding is evidence that there is process of subterranean maturation going on in the proletariat, “the growing awareness in the class that we are facing an existential crisis of the present civilization/order. This realisation is unclearly formulated among the class but it is clearly growing in weight and becoming increasingly obvious to many, even if in a semi-conscious way”.

A new phase in the class struggle

The main focus or questions and disagreements at the meeting was the question of the “rupture” in the class struggle. The disagreement was put forward in particular by MH, a member of the Old Moles Collective. MH agreed with us on the importance of what happened in May 68 and after, but argues that the ICC has not heeded its own warnings – formulated in particular at its 21st International Congress[3] - against overestimating the class struggle, while at the same time underestimating the capacity of the bourgeoisie to respond to it. In his view, the class movement of the 1970s and early 80s was defeated by a counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie which also enabled the latter to introduce economic changes which gave the system a breathing space. He recognises a “limited revival” of the class struggle after 2022 but with its concept of the “rupture” the ICC is underestimating the long-lasting impact of the defeat of the 80s and making the same error of overestimation of the class struggle which lay behind its idea of a “turning point” in the struggle in 2003.

In fact, the ICC does not at all underestimate the depth of the set-back in the class struggle over the last three decades, which certainly included a number of important defeats, such as that of the miners in Britain in 1984-5. Nor do we deny the reality of a bourgeois counter-offensive from the late 1970s onwards – an offensive which expressed itself both at the political level (the re-alignment of bourgeois political forces and massive ideological campaigns) and in the economic level, although the “breathing space” allowed by so-called globalisation was largely the result of the collapse of the old bloc system and the consequent rise of China as a “locomotive” for the world economy[4]. The downfall of the USSR and its bloc was simultaneously the basis for the massive ideological onslaught about the “death of communism”, which was a major factor in the disorientation of the working class from the beginning of the 1990s. Neither of these latter developments can be separated from the process of capitalist decomposition, marked by the growing atomisation of social relations and the rise of all kinds of irrational ideas, which has greatly exacerbated the proletariat’s loss of confidence and its capacity to see itself as a distinct social class.

The gradual recovery of class identity (without which there can be no prospect of proletarian politicisation of the struggle) is linked to the worsening economic crisis, which can only lead to direct and massive attacks on the exploited and force them to react on their own class terrain, unlike specific phenomena of decomposition, such as the ecological crisis, which, in the absence of sufficient politicisation, tend to give rise to fragmented reactions on bourgeois terrain, particularly that of so-called democratic ‘reforms’. Alongside this danger, that of interclassism, mixing workers' demands with those of small business owners or other intermediate social strata, as was the case with the Yellow Vests, presents the danger of diluting a still fragile proletariat into other strata of society, when it is still only at the very beginning of the process of regaining its own class identity.

Although fraught with difficulties, this struggle is well and truly underway. This is precisely what we believe has been happening since 2022, where workers have gone on strike and taken to the streets on the basis of resisting attacks (on wages, pensions, etc) that have been building up over a long period, together with a mounting feeling in the class that “enough is enough” and that the promised consolations for years of austerity have not materialised.

These class movements have therefore also been the product of a long period of subterranean maturation which gives them a depth far more significant than the “limited revival” which MH refers to. As we have already noted, this underground process is already giving rise to real expressions of class consciousness at various levels: in a very small minority searching for marxist clarity and considering an organisational involvement; in a slightly wider minority looking for an internationalist response to capitalist wars; and in the more outward and massive manifestations of the struggle, for example in France, with young demonstrating workers reclaiming their continuity with May-June 68, or making a clear link between the build-up of the war economy and their declining living standards.

Building the bridge to the future party

In our conclusion to the meeting, we summed up the responsibilities facing revolutionaries in the present world situation. Because we are not living in a period of counter-revolution, of historical defeat, the road to the formation of the future party remains open, even if we are talking about a very long road with numerous obstacles to surmount on the way. The task we face today is not that of proclaiming ourselves to be the party already, in the Bordigist manner, but of building the bridge which leads to the party, an organisation capable of having a real impact on the course of the class struggle.

In our view, this work, similar to that of a fraction, can only be accomplished by a political organisation with a clear programme, centralised on an international scale, and able to pass on a wealth of experience at the organisational and political level. Evidently, we think that the ICC is uniquely qualified to carry out this role, not least because of the prevailing opportunism and sectarianism within the existing proletarian political camp. But the majority of the militants of the ICC come from the “1968” generation and our organisation needs to transmit the lessons of its 50 years of existence to new generations of comrades willing to join its ranks.

The Bolshevik tradition on the question of adherence to the revolutionary organisation, which is our tradition as well, is that the organisation has to be based on the profound militant commitment of all its members. But if the organisation must assume the role of a vanguard in the development of the revolutionary movement, its influence must also radiate outwards and draw towards it a whole network of sympathisers and fellow travellers who are ready to support and defend it. We gave two concrete examples of how comrades can assist the ICC in the short term: help us to distribute the Manifesto (and our press in general) as widely as possible, and send us their reflections on the debates at this public meeting in order to take the discussion forward.

Amos, December 2025