This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC in the US, is a further contribution to our effort to follow the evolution of the situation in the US after the election of Trump. It follows on from an article written by the same comrade in April.

What can the world expect from the new Trump Administration in the USA? Instead of joining in with this crystal ball gazing about the near future of American state policy, we will try here first of all to analyse why Trump was elected president, although the traditional established political elites did not want him.

As the 2016 US Presidential campaign approaches its crescendo, the media promises us this election might be the most important in US History. The bombastic billionaire Donald J. Trump, representing the Republican Party, and the much berated former First Lady and Democratic Senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton face one another in a dramatic showdown amid a media spectacle designed to convince the populace of the absolute importance of participating in the electoral process even when neither candidate is a source of great inspiration.

We publish here a second letter to the Tampa Communist League, in response to DP's reply on TCL's website to our previous letter. For us the last two questions – the relationship between activity and period, and the principal lessons of the Russian revolution regarding party and power – are probably the most important ones for further debate.

We are publishing a contribution from a comrade in the USA which takes a very critical stance on the recent ‘fast food strikes’. We invite comments, especially from other comrades in the USA, in order to help place these developments in the broader context of the class struggle in the USA and internationally.

In bourgeois mythology the first settlers to America were free men and women who built a democratic and egalitarian society from scratch in the New World. The reality is that the American proletariat was born into bondage and slave labour, faced barbaric punishment if it resisted, and was forced to struggle for its basic rights against a brutal capitalist regime that most resembled a prison without walls.

It is often said that the history of the class struggle in America for the last four decades, that is, since the late 1960’s, is the history of an almost uninterrupted wave of defeats and rollback.Is it then correct to conclude that the working class has lost its battle against capitalism? Should we accept  that we are at the point where the reversal of the balance of forces in favor of the working class is no longer possible?  Are the struggles that the working class still engages in a sign of its waning, a reflection of a slow, but irreversible process toward all-out defeat?  Does all of this mean that the working class is no longer the social force in society that has the potential and historic mission to destroy capitalist relations of exploitation and give birth to a communist world?

On Monday, September 10th 2012, 26,000 teachers in Chicago struck for the first time in 25 years and after years of suffering attacks on their benefits, wage freezes, and ever more appalling and degrading working conditions. The ICC have produced this leaflet in response.

leaflet.pdf

The winter months have now placed some distance between us in the here and now and the days when the Occupy Movement created a wave of occupations that seemed unstoppable across the U.S. Was this movement an ephemeral whim of the masses’ imagination, an accident of history, or rather part and parcel of the general and wider struggles put forth by the working class and other non-exploiting strata of society against capitalist oppression?

In this two-part series of articles about the employed and unemployed workers’ struggle of the 1930’s we have looked at what seem to us to have been the strengths and weaknesses of that movement. We think that this kind of assessment is important in the context of the present economic crisis and the struggles that it has given birth to, especially regarding the development of protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. In this first part we will look at the present attacks against the working class, and especially the unemployed. Then we will start the examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the movement of the 1930’s. In the next article, we will focus more in detail on its weaknesses and broach the question of what lessons to draw for the present and future struggles of the class.

We are publishing here the calls from the Occupy Oakland General Assembly for a general strike on 2 November. This is a significant development in the ‘Occupy’ movement in the US, which while generally critical of ‘capitalism’ has also been hampered by a very confused view of what capitalism is, and in particular about the only way to oppose it: through the class struggle. But this appeal, coming after a number of very bitter experiences of police repression, marks a real step forward in that it is a direct call to the local working class to support the movement through striking.

Here we are publishing an exchange that occurred between the comrades who were engaged in the intervention toward the striking Verizon workers, some of them ICC militants, some of them sympathizers. They worked in close collaboration from the early tossing around of ideas about what to write in the leaflet that was to be distributed, to the actual distribution of the leaflet and several discussions held with the striking workers, and to the post-intervention reflection, which is what is published here. We cannot stress enough the importance of the collective nature of this work. It is important for the sympathizers as they get a ‘hands-on’ experience of actually intervening in the class struggle with a collective framework that is the product of open discussions. It is important for the ICC as it continues to listen to and learn from the insights of the young –and not so young—generation of elements and groups in search of a political direction new and creative ways of approaching different issues.

In The Independent of 3/9/11 there appeared an article based on secret files that the paper had unearthed. We are reprinting here substantial extracts from that article. The Independent says that they “reveal the astonishingly close links that existed between British and American governments and Muammar Gaddafi.”

For the first time in 11 years, 45,000 Verizon workers across the Mid-Atlantic region have returned to the class struggle, courageously refusing to submit to the bosses’ logic of making the working class pay for the deepening economic crisis of capitalism!  Our exploiters say we should sacrifice to help the economy get going again, or to support the profitability of a company in order to safeguard jobs. But the latest draconian assault on pension benefits is proof that the more workers give in, the longer they delay their response to the boss’s attacks, the more emboldened and brutal the next round of attacks will be.

In less than a month at the time of writing, a second border clash left at least 14 dead and scores of wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd of Palestinian protesters trying to break into the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights from Syria. Barely one month before, hundreds of people broke through a border fence and clashed with thousands of Israeli troops mobilized in anticipation of possible unrest as Palestinians prepared to protest the anniversary of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Mideast war. This is just a ‘skirmish’ compared to the history of violence and bloodletting that stains the region...