100 years ago, humanity stood on the brink of the abyss, about to plunge into the most terrible bloodletting ever seen in history. For generations after the Great War, 1914-18 was synonymous with senseless murder, a ghastly waste of life in the horror of the trenches, for which the suffering populations rendered the governments and the ruling classes largely responsible. To commemorate the war, one hundred years on, is thus something of an embarassment for those same ruling classes, and so 2014 became a year, not of commemoration but of forgetting.

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“The world we live in is a little mad. In Kosovo we discover crimes against humanity every day; other less spectacular but equally horrible conflicts in Africa and Asia; economic and financial crises which break out suddenly, unforeseen and destructive; growing poverty in many parts of the world...” (quoted in Le Monde, 22/6/99).

Over the summer there was no pause in the convulsions of the capitalist world.

As we saw in December 1995 with the maneuver orchestrated against the working class in France and more generally against the European proletariat, the bourgeoisie is always abl

On the eve of World War I, when revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg declared the internationalist position characteristic of capitalism's new historic phase - "There is no

Mercilessly, events are giving the lie to bourgeois propaganda.

Everywhere, from the developed to the under­developed countries, in every branch of industry, capitalism in crisis is imposing; its austerity on the workers.

We publish below a leaflet written and distributed by some contacts in Ecuador at the time of the Peru/Ecuador war in January 1981.

The principal purpose of this article is to develop some of the groundwork for the analysis of the post-1945 economic boom that was sketched out in International Review n°133 under the title "State capitalism and the war economy".

Our contention is that it is capitalism's driving forces which determine both the extraordinary dynamism of s ascendant period, impelling it from its beginnings in the city-states of Italy and Flanders to the creation of the first planetary society, and the enormous destructiveness of capitalism's decadent period that has subjected humanity to two world wars whose barbarity would have made Genghis Khan blench, and which today threaten our species' very existence.

There has been a lot of hype in the mass media about the so-called 'Greatest Generation' -- the generation that fought in World War II. First there was "Saving Private Ryan," the Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks, which glorified the sacrifices of those who fought in the war. More recently, there has been a media campaign to erect a monument to the soldiers and sailors who "made the world safe for the American way of life." Tom Brokaw, one of the most prominent television news reporters/broadcasters in the United States, has published two books on this generation, both those who fought in the war. The television news has been inundated with "heart-warming" stories about "long overdue" medals and citations being awarded to aging veterans. Various tributes have been made to the factory workers who worked long and hard to produce the weapons and materials needed to prosecute the war. A strong dose of gratitude is handed to those men and women who were not sent into combat but who worked under often dangerous and difficult conditions to keep production for war going at a fierce pace. There has been homage to all the women who worked as nurses or factory workers or truck drivers to keep war production going.