The current situation in Germany is in a sense, a concentrate of a whole series of issues of major importance in the present situation: Germany is at the heart of the refugee crisis, the rise in populism and the threat this poses to political stability, the imperialist confrontations with Russia, to name but a few. This report, adopted by the February 2016 joint conference of the ICC sections in Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, does not claim to be complete but rather to open up a reflection on these difficult questions.

In 1914, the German Social-Democratic Party was the most powerful party of the Second International. With more than one million members, it was the largest single political party in Europe and the largest party in any European parliament. Socialists throughout the world, faced with the threat of war in the last days before that fateful 4th August, waited for the SPD to live up to its solemn commitments made at the International's congresses at Stuttgart and Basel, and oppose the war. Yet on 4th August, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted for the Imperial government's war credits, and the way to war was open.

How the German Party degenerated in the years leading up to 1914 to the point where it betrayed its most fundamental principles, and the struggle of the left in the party against this degeneration, is the subject of the article that follows.

Firstly, we welcome the recent appearance of this work by D. Authier and J. Barrot, which clearly attempts to make a clear analysis of the Left Communists from the viewpoint of revolutionary marxism, and which moreover will allow revolutionaries to study hitherto inaccessible texts of the Communist Left. The book is one of the very few to put forward the communist perspective -- the only possible perspective in the historical period inaugurated by the Russian Revolution -- of the proletarian revolution. The book has many strengths, but also some weaknesses, which we would like to discuss here.

Report on the national situation from the section of the ICC in Germany

On Wednesday the 12th of November 120.000 school kids took to the streets in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Munich, Trier and many other German

The article below has just been published by the ICC's section in Germany to denounce the arrest and imprisonment in isolation ward of several German intellectuals accused of terrorism and belonging to a so-called "Militant Group".

All the forces of the bourgeoisie, the left, the right, the far right and the extreme left, not to mention the trades unions, all came together in the grand electoral orchestra, whether in France and Holland for the referendums on the European constitution, for the parliamentary elections in Britain, or the Länder elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most heavily-populated region).

The six day strike at Opel in Bochum in October 2004, in response to the threat of mass redundancies and possible plant closures by General Motors, was the longest and most significant, spontaneous, unofficial strike in a major plant in Germany since the great wildcat strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article seeks to understand the context of this recent struggle and the lessons that can be drawn from it.

Sixty years ago, in January 1933, an event of historic importance struck capitalist civilisation: the arrival of Hitler to power and the installation of the Nazi regime in Germany. To listen to the bourgeoisie, fascism was brutally imposed on capitalist society, forced onto its reluctant body. Not for a moment does this lie stand up to the test of historic facts. In reality, Nazism in Germany, as fascism in Italy, is the organic product of capital. The victory of Nazism came about democratically. As to the repugnant racism, the nationalist hysteria or the barbarity which, again, according to the democratic bourgeoisie, characterises the fascist regimes, they are not at all specific to these regimes. They are, on the contrary, the product of capitalism, in particular in its phase of decadence, and the attributes of all factions of the bourgeoisie be they democratic, stalinist or fascist.

Anarchy as an essential characteristic of capitalism

In Weltrevolution 124 we reported on the first of a series of public meetings of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) in Berlin. The second meeting took place on May 15th. There, the causes of imperialist war were debated. A representative of Battaglia Comunista, the IBRP's section in Italy, made the presentation which dealt with the background to the Iraq War and the contemporary foreign policy of the USA. The comrade put forward the analysis of the IBRP, according to which the American "crusade against terrorism" mainly serves economic goals: the tightening of American control over the oil reserves of the world, in order to bolster the hegemony of the Dollar over the world economy, and thus to assure itself the cream of an additional "oil rent" profit. As a result of its waning capacity to compete, the USA has to rely on the parasitic appropriation of the surplus value produced world wide to keep its own economy afloat. In addition it was said that strategic considerations do also play a role, often in connection with the control of oil reserves, aimed at cutting off Russia and China from each other and from important oil fields, and at keeping the European Union weak and divided.

It is sixty years since the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto; and by a strange irony of history, exactly one hundred years before, in 1843, Karl Marx had published his On the Jewish Question, a text which marked a significant step by Marx from radical democracy towards communism. We will come back to this text in another article; here it suffices to say that, while Marx supported the abolition of all feudal constraints on the participation of Jews in civil society, he also pointed out the inherent limitations of any merely ‘political’ emancipation which was founded on the atomised citizen, and showed that real freedom could only take place on the social level, with the creation of a unified community which had overcome commodity relations, the underlying source of man’s fragmentation into competing units.